For over the last 25 years, Pixar has brought out some of the most visually amazing animated films. From Toy Story to Soul, Pixar has found a way to make outstanding films and while not every film they have made is great and perfect, they still find a way to evolve and do something new for each film. Now when you think of Pixar the first film you automatically think of is Toy Story and the reason why is because it’s not only the film that gave Pixar it’s spark but it’s the one film that has been loved by 3 different generations of kids so far and is quite frankly the most popular film under the company. Pixar and Disney both have been creating amazing films together during the 25 years of Pixar creating feature films and they all have found success. Sure there are hit and misses like Cars 2 or The Good Dinosaur but then there are huge hits and masterpieces like Ratatouille or Up. But there is one film Pixar created that stands out from the rest, a film that uses a different approach to tell its story and engage the viewers. This film went to go on to be a critically successful film and gross over $520 million and would win a bunch of awards including a Golden Globe, a Saturn Award, a Hugo Award and an Academy Award. This film is one of Pixar’s most successful films and yet it somehow is an underrated masterpiece. Now while it has a high rating percentage of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, it still kind of gets overshadowed by many of the newer and slightly older films. But of all the films in the Pixar library, Wall-E somehow manages to be the one true film to be a masterpiece and somehow be underrated, even though it is highly rated by critics. Animation Month is among us and I want to review Pixar’s most unique film and talk about why Wall-E is Pixar’s Underrated Masterpiece.
*SPOILER WARNING AHEAD*
Wall-E is a pretty loveable film and is one of the most successful films from Pixar/Disney and while you won’t be seeing the character plastered all over the Disney Parks, you can find him in many people’s hearts as Wall-E is a film that many people, from kids to even adults, love and cherish. But while the film is pretty well known to the world I still want to talk about it because quite frankly it’s one of those Pixar films I watched in my early pre-teens to even now in my adult life and loved everything about it. Generally this review is more for the fact that I wanted to review an animated film that I know is great and I know can really use more love and appreciation but remember this film is appreciated by many people but it kind of gets slightly overshadowed by films like the Toy Story Franchise, Monster’s Inc. and Up. Those films are all great films in their own way but Wall-E is great for different reasons.
Wall-E was directed and created by Andrew Stanton, a man who needs no introduction as he was one of the driving forces of some of your favorite Pixar animated films of the last 25 years including the Toy Story franchise, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Monster’s Inc. and of course Wall-E. Now Wall-E as I said before is different than most Pixar films as for this film instead of having dialogue to tell its story, it uses the animation and visuals. The voice cast in the film is mainly used for the robots but also human characters and for the first and only time in a Pixar film, a live action character was used for the film. So the cast of the film includes: Ben Burtt (Wall-E/M-O), Elissa Knight (EVE), Jeff Garlin (Captain), John Ratzenberger (John), Kathy Najimy (Mary), Sigourney Weaver (Ship’s Computer) and a live action performance from Fred Willard (Shelby Forthright). I left off a character in this film as AUTO was voiced by MacINTalk which is the text-to-speech program for Apple Macintosh computers. It was also used for M-O in some scenes and multiple other robots but still generally this is something pretty cool to know considering it’s the only non-human member of the cast. Now generally the voice cast is used 30% of this film as the rest of the 70% of the film is all animation and visuals and while most of the dialogue in this film is robot sounds, it’s pretty unique and incredible and if you put the subtitles on for the film most of the robot sounds are actually words being said in a robotic way like “woah” or “pathetic”. Wall-E came out in 2008; a year that I talked about recently with Dark Knight as the films that came out in 2008 were all over the place as there were some big hit successful films like The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionare, Iron-Man and Milk and then there was critical flops like The Happening, The Love Guru and Meet the Spartans. However many critics believe that this film was the best film of 2008 and while I can’t argue with that opinion I can say for me it is the 2nd best film of that year (Dark Knight being number one). The story, the visuals and the characters are all phenomenal in this film but I will talk about them all throughout this review as they are the driving forces of why this film is such a masterpiece.
Wall-E’s opening scene opens the movie with beautiful visuals of space while we have a background song of Hello Dolly’s “Put On Your Sunday Clothes”. We beautifully see visuals of space, the stars, the galaxy, planets and the song’s lyrics plays beautifully with the visuals as one lyric, “out there, form of shine and sparkles”, perfectly embodies what we are seeing on the screen as the stars and the whole galaxy in general shines and sparkles right in front of our eyes. More importantly this part of the opening scene doesn’t even look animated and looks live action. Even when the camera pans to Earth and we dive down into Earth, everything in this part of the opening scene is visually beautiful as Earth looks horrendous with dust and garbage all around it and more importantly the film is using a happy song like Put On Your Sunday Clothes and the lyrics talks about a whole world being out there but when you look deep into the visuals all you see is garbage and no human life or even animals. The Earth has purely been forgotten and it seems that no life form is alive or living on Earth, that is until we see a robot. Once we meet Wall-E we can see how beautiful the animation is as the time we meet Wall-E and get to know him and the area around him we get to see the beautiful animation used in this film and see how remarkable it is. This isn’t your colorful animated film; this is more of a very drastically low color grading animated film that tells a story without having a full story being told yet. The world was left to decay by the humans and we don’t know why up until this point. All we see is Buy N Large everywhere and just piles of garbage and decay. We see a newspaper that says “BNL CEO Declares Global Emergency” because of the consumerism of trash filled on Earth. There isn’t any life on this Earth, no human, no animals, not even plant life and we don’t know why. However our curiosity draws us in of where is everyone and why is Wall-E and his pet cockroach the only true meanings of life on Earth. Now Wall-E’s character is pretty loveable as everything about him is either adorable or enjoyable as he is the last robot living of his kind, he the only true life form on the planet and from still doing his protocol job of cleaning the garbage to collecting knick knacks and all sorts of things left on earth that humans enjoyed throughout life he kind of humanizes himself from the other robots that have unfortunately died. All of this and the fact that he enjoys everything he finds on Earth whether it’s a random item or even the film Hello Dolly and the music in the film, he generally loves everything but at the same time he feels emotions about all these things, something that in the time period the film is taking place can be possible.
I want to skip to the part where we meet EVE as Wall-E characteristics begin to change a bit. From the beginning of the film to this part other than his pet cockroach, he is alone and is looking for some sort of companionship. We learn before this that the people that lived on Earth at one point went on a spaceship and went to space thanks to BNL and it’s been so long and no one has come back to Earth, leaving all the other Wall-E robots to be the final life forms and only one survived. Wall-E is alone and just living life I guess, that is until he meets a new robot that came from out of nowhere and from a space ship. This robot is named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and she kind of brings this spark into Wall-E’s life as he feels emotions that he has never felt before and the same can be said for EVE. While her main goal is classified at that moment, we know she has a main goal to achieve but while this is all going down she is learning about Earth itself since it’s the first time she is on Earth. Wall-E shows her bubble wrap, a Rubix cube, even the film and song he loves. He then brings her what appears to be a plant in soil and she takes it and turns off. The plant represents Earth’s life as we find this out later in the film what is so important about the plant, but most of all we learn why it’s so important to the relationship between EVE and Wall-E. I will come back to that later but it’s kind of funny to know that when Wall-E finds the plant he is mesmerized by it as it is the first thing of life he as ever seen in person, so he keeps it like a trophy, just like the rest of the things he collected. When EVE sees it for the first time we get to learn what her protocol is, even though we learn more about it later on, but the robotic part of her character comes out and she shuts down, mainly due to the fact that she found what she was looking for and her main goal is completed. Wall-E however takes care of the lifeless EVE and spends every second that she is shutdown with her, protecting her and once the ship that brought EVE to Earth returns and takes her, he follows her because one he wants to protect her, but two he found someone he cares for and loves and doesn’t want to lose.
I want to kind of talk about a recurring thing that I notice in this film so I need to jump back and forth throughout the film. As I said before we don’t know about the fact of why the humans went into space except with the fact to there being too much garbage on Earth but the plant in this film is the key to bring them back to Earth as it represents life. The plant represents the life on Earth as it is the first sign of Earth going back to normal but it needs people, water and oxygen in order to stay alive and in order for more plant life to grow, thus bringing back Earth to normal. EVE’s directive and protocol is to find some sort of life like the plant and bring it back to the ship’s Captain so he can put it into this detector in the ship that will later automatically bring the ship and the people on the ship back to Earth. But while the plant represents the life on Earth, Wall-E represents the true life towards the people/robots that he meets. Wall-E represents the last true life form on Earth and Wall-E is kind of a unique character as he is a robot and usually robots don’t feel emotions or have any value in life and yet Wall-E does. He brings value and something important to these other robots in the film that is new to them. For EVE she begins to become kind of humanized, at least the level Wall-E is in, and she begins to feel feelings that Wall-E is feeling for her in the film. It takes time for her to feel these feelings but soon after Wall-E has the missing plant she hugs and kisses him and they have a very cute moment together. It isn’t until later on in the film that she truly values him as a love interest and an important part of her new life directive which is no longer about the pant but wanting to be with him. We see something change in the other robots as well as the ones who are in repairs are freed by Wall-E in a way and can roam around with no true protocol. Even the robot Wall-E meets before taking the elevator to the Captain gains something from Wall-E. Wall-E waves at him and the robot who protocol is just to type kind of begins to move its arm like a wave and when it see’s Wall-E again it is continuously waving at him. It’s a cute little added detail but Wall-E gave it more life and purpose in a sense and he does the same to the human characters.
All of the Human characters in this film kind of represent a zombie in a way or even a robot as they are sort of lifeless and do the same thing every day. Each human is out of shape and are distracted in front of a screen that they sit in front of and consume food and drinks, pretty much consumerism but in a sense of it destroying human life in away and making them feel lifeless and out of touch with their surroundings. Buy N Large is kind of hypnotizing people and the humans are stuck in this hypnosis and it takes Wall-E to get them out of this hypnosis. We first kind of see this with the characters John and Mary as Wall-E bumps into John and John falls out of his seat. He becomes aware of something other than Buy N Large and meets Wall-E. The same happens for Mary as she is too busy paying attention to a screen and it takes Wall-E to sort of turn the screen off for her to interact with him. Once the screen goes away everything about her changes and she begins to interact with her surroundings. Later on she meets John and both of them have a very cute interaction with seeing Wall-E outside in space and they touch hands and kind of fall in love in a sense. Its very cliché but they begin to interact with each other and do more things other than sitting in front of a screen. Finally there is the Captain. He isn’t lifeless but more has a daily routine he likes to do but he is unaware of Earth. That is until he meets Wall-E. When Wall-E shakes his hand he gets dirt on it and when he asks the computer to scan the dirt he becomes not only aware of Earth but gets so engaged with Earth and learns everything about Earth and is so in love with Earth. Wall-E changed a lot of these characters by giving them something that they haven’t really had, something to enjoy or just giving them more life. Human or Robot he made them feel something that can only be found by a life form from Earth and he represents life on Earth just as much as the plant does and I think that’s why his character is the true centerpiece of this film, not only because his name is in the title but because he is the true key to Earth, we just believed it was the plant but in actuality Wall-E was the one who found the plant so without him there would be no life on Earth, no oxygen, no humans, etc.
I want to move back and talk about EVE and Wall-E’s relationship in this film as I mentioned before that she would begins to feel feelings for him once Wall-E found the plant and they had a very adorable moment in space where we got an amazing cinematic scene with the two flying together and sharing a hug and a kiss. I can’t lie that scene is pretty heartwarming. However she still has this directive/protocol to bring the plant to the Captain. However all of that changes once Auto attacks Wall-E, leaving him at a very low energy like stage/dying. She lets out a huge emotional scream when Auto attacks and when Wall-E falls into the junk space on the ship and we finally see that she truly cares for him just as much as he does for her. Then there is the scene in the junk space as Wall-E is dying and EVE is looking for a control board, which is pretty much Wall-E’s heart and memory, as his is damaged. Wall-E gives her the plant but she chooses him over the plant as her directive no longer is the plant. She could care less about Earth, she cares more about Wall-E and this scene shows her true love for Wall-E. This movie is a better love story than Twilight, I know we’ve heard that joke many times but come on it’s the truth. We get an emotional and powerful scene with barely any dialogue and visually we get a love story that tells us everything we want to know. Wall-E however goes back to the plant as while he truly loves EVE, he can’t be fixed without the parts in his home on Earth. The last act of the film might be about getting the plant to Earth but it’s more about saving Wall-E as he is slowly dying and everyone that he gave something to enjoy or just a bit of life in general are now going to help bring that plant back to Earth as well and help Wall-E to bring him fully back to life.
I’m going to quickly run through this final act up until the saddest scene of the film so here we go. Wall-E is holding up the detector so the plant can go in. The Captain see’s what is going on as Auto crushes Wall-E inside the detector. This then leads The Captain to stand up for the first time and fight back and attack Auto and put him onto Manual, get it Auto Drive, Manual Drive lol, but EVE takes the plant and puts it in the detector, letting it open up and Wall-E is close to his death, pretty much in a coma state. Once the ship lands onto Earth EVE goes back to Wall-E’s home and repairs him and replaces his control board. However when Wall-E awakens his memories of everything is gone, the love for EVE, the love for all of his knick knacks and even his pet cockroach, they’re all gone and he is back to a normal robot. His personality that he had was gone and EVE didn’t know what to do, ultimately breaking her heart. She holds his hand and gives him a kiss goodbye but when she tries to let go of his hand she is stuck. That final kiss sparks his memory back to normal and restores his original personality. This film might be centered on climate change and bringing life back onto Earth, but the center of this whole film is the love story between two robots and in the end it is executed perfectly. In the end The Captain plants the plant into the Earth’s remaining soil and we later see plant life beginning to grow and human life interacting with Earth. It’s a slow process but throughout the credits we see in animated form life go back to normal and Earth becomes new again.
I have to say re-watching Wall-E for a movie review truly made me love the movie more. I love almost each character in the film with one exception. I didn’t truly like AUTO as the villain. Technically he isn’t the villain because he is just following protocols but he comes off as a villain so automatically when he becomes this out of nowhere twist villain I kind of lose my care and enjoyment for the character. I think his twist was forced a bit and while the character does play a key role with the ending and the film in general, I kind of don’t care for him as much, or it as much, or…I don’t care for the robot character lol. However I will give it a participation medal on being a villain as all it did was try and kill Wall-E twice and continue to brainwash The Captain. But as a whole I truly love this movie, even more now after this viewing. Andrew Stanton has stated in multiple interviews that there is no true message in this film and I don’t know about all of that because the film quietly has themes of climate change, consumerism, obesity, waste management and most of all a global environment catastrophe as the film literally has all of these themes embedded into the film and kids won’t understand all of that but young adults and adults in general will. The film in a sense is an early life lesson for kids to take care of the environment and the climate around you because if you don’t then the Earth around you will begin to decay and lose its life. In a sense that’s the general message I see in this film, but also one person’s life can bring back life to others, or in this case a little robot can bring life to other robots and lifeless humans. Once Wall-E interacts with someone new, robot or human, he technically is bringing them something new for their life, whether it’s learning how to wave, love, learning about Earth or just interacting with your surroundings. Andrew Stanton might say there is no true message for this film but in general the film is about bringing our Earth back to life and to stop consumerism as if we don’t leave this path we will be bringing toxicity to our planet and every life form will be close to extinction. That’s shown to us early on in the film as no one is on Earth when we are first introduced to the planet and all over BNL is plastered as it is the corporation that pretty much destroyed Earth and instead of fixing the problem, they became the bigger part of the problem by bringing the problem onto a spaceship and bringing the humans with it and now in space they become consumed with every BNL product and become lifeless zombies who become obese and fall under doing the same thing all over again. Andrew Stanton created a smart movie and wanted us to find this message in the film so we can be self aware with how we treat Earth and our environment today and he does it in a pretty simple manner.
I truly loved the visuals and animation in this film. They looked incredible and still hold up well today as the colors in this film change throughout. It goes from dull, lacking color on Earth to colorful and full of life on the ship as it shows that life on Earth was consumed onto a ship and without that life Earth loses its true colors, but once we come back onto Earth we go back to the dull low color grading because our main true reason of life existence at this point, Wall-E is dead. Once he is repaired and his memory returns the colors begin to shine more and throughout the credits the colors become colorful. I got to give the Pixar animators and storyteller’s props as they are the true reason why this film is outstanding. Andrew Stanton can do so much to bring this film to life, but the whole animation department really showed their true colors in this film and created a beautiful story with their animation and visuals. Also I need to give props to Thomas Newman, the man who was head of the music. The musical scores in this film are beautiful and match perfectly with the actions going on in the film and he did a remarkable job in bringing the music to life in this animated film. Finally I need to give props to everyone who worked on this movie. The people in the cinematography department, the voice cast, the producers, hell even Disney itself, they all created this beautiful story and it was executed beautifully.
I can go on and on about this film but my point of this film was to prove why this film is an Underrated Masterpiece. This film is highly rated but sadly it is the 12th highest rated film of the 23 Pixar films. This film should be rated a bit higher as it is truly a better film than half of the films rated above it and it’s rare to find an animated film that doesn’t try to engage you with funny dialogue or just fun loveable characters but engage you with beautiful visuals and a purely heartwarming story. There are films like that but Wall-E to me is the true groundbreaking animated film that kind of changed the way animators and storytellers tell their story. Up’s first 10 minutes was half dialogue but the scene where we see Ellie and Carl’s life together was done purely without dialogue and with amazing music and animation and beautiful storytelling. Funny enough Pete Docter helped make Wall-E’s story and directed and created the story for Up, but there was a scene in Soul where the animation plays a big role in storytelling rather using dialogue. I can’t say much about it because it’s brand new and in time I will talk about it so go check out Soul to see the scene I want to talk about but can’t. Anyway this film truly has amazing animation and visuals, beautiful music, very loveable characters and most of all a story that any viewer at any age will fall in love with. This film might get overshadowed by many films that did a bit better in the box office or any film named Toy Story but that doesn’t mean they are better than this film. Wall-E is a cinematic masterpiece that truly embodies Pixar’s amazing storytelling and love for filmmaking/animation. A lot of love went into making this film and I’m happy to say it’s one of my favorite Pixar films of all time.
Final Rating: 4.8 out of 5 Stars, 98% out of 100
Comments